Being at Olin, we've learned that teams are an important part of a project: if a team isn't passionate, all on the same page and actively taking care of team health, then a project can be hard to complete and the results suffer.

That's why on Lab 1015 we all valued team health. First of all, team health starts with personal health. Whenever a team member hadn't slept, we would urge them to go to sleep and assure them that we could take over the work they were doing (if there was a time crunch) or that they could get it done later (if there wasn't). Although we really wanted to see our robots be the way we wanted them to, there were also times when we had to acknowledge a point of diminishing returns. You know, that point late at night (early in the morning) when we decided that we were too exhausted to contribute meaningful work and that it'd be better for us to go to bed.

Another important part of team health was food. Food is the way to a person's heart, it engages people and it reminds one of home and family. That's why we always had food around. We had a PoE snack bag under our table which contained, for example, milano cookies, pistachios and olives. We brought our own food from our dorms, or went out and bought food to share with our teammates. After break, we had met up and went together to Shaanxi Gourmet, a Chinese restaurant in Natick. Like with family, we shared food with each other and laughed about funny things that happened to us. Alli got the pork and pickled tuber mustard soup, discovering her love for pickled tuber mustard.

The third most important part of maintaining our team health was meeting up and staying up-to-date with what the rest of the group was doing. We scrummed every night at 9pm in one of the lounges of our dorm (with the exception of a few nights, where we didn't need to, were all too busy or ..honestly forgot). These meetings sometimed lasted ten minutes or sometimes two hours, depending on how much we needed to tell each other and talk about decisions we needed to make. Our dedicated group working time was on Sundays from 6 to 9pm. During this time, we tried to do tasks together and help each other. We also symbolically got sushi on the first and last Sunday meeting (because we love food).

Having good team health helped us get through stressful times and made playing with our robots at the end so much fun!